Analysis Topic: Interest Rates and the Bond Market

Monday, June 19, 2017

The June 18 edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole has a few less stock charts this week in order to ramp up the macro talk, which appeared periodically through the report; but especially in the Precious Metals and Bonds segments. Excerpted from NFTRH 452…

Bonds & Related Indicators (and more macro discussion)

The target for TLT continues to be around 129. Treasury bonds are in bull trends (remember back a few months ago to all the bond hatred in the media). How does an eventual decline in bonds square with what we just noted above regarding Q4 2008? [work done in the preceding Precious Metals segment] Treasury bonds were a wonderfully bullish asset during Armageddon ’08 and who’s to say that an upside blow off may not be coming sooner rather than later amid massively over bullish sentiment? I mean, there is certainly no stop sign at our 129 target. Sentiment, as we are all too aware, can take a long while to manifest in pricing.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

All of a sudden the Fed got a little tougher. Perhaps the success of the hit movie Wonder Woman has inspired Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen to discard her prior timidity to show us how much monetary muscle she can flex when the time comes for action.

Although the Fed's decision this week to raise interest rates by 25 basis points was widely expected, the surprise came in how the medicine was administered. Most observers had expected a "dovish" hike in which a slight tightening would be accompanied by an abundance of caution, exhaustive analysis of downside risks, and assurances that the Fed would think twice before proceeding any farther. But that's not what happened. Instead Yellen adopted what should be viewed as the most hawkish policy stance of her chairmanship.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

This cycle’s main bubble is in government bonds and fiat currencies, with a dash of large-cap tech thrown in for variety. But like a hurricane spawning tornadoes at its periphery, this Money Bubble is creating secondary bubbles like student debt and subprime auto loans that are impressively destructive in their own right.

An example of how extreme things have gotten is US housing, which — as the previous decade’s main bubble — wasn’t supposed to be a problem this time around. But apparently no sector is immune from all that excess central bank liquidity. As today’s Wall Street Journal notes, the subprime mortgage is now being resurrected:

Monday, June 12, 2017

As advanced economies struggle with stagnation, one monetary era is about to change. After a decade of massive easing, the US Fed is hiking rates and moving to reduce its massive $4.5 trillion balance sheet. There are no historical precedents but there will be global repercussions.

As the central banks of major advanced economies are pondering the shift from massive easing to gradual tightening, all other nations must adjust to these huge shifts, whatever their current status quo. Read full article... Read full article...

Thursday, June 08, 2017

As we’ve been outlining for weeks now, Subprime 2.0 is the subprime auto-loan industry. And just as the collapse in the subprime mortgage lending was what signaled the beginning of the housing crisis… trouble in the subprime auto-loan industry will be what signals that the next Debt Crisis is here.

Tuesday, June 06, 2017

The bounce in Treasury yields witnessed after the election of Donald Trump is now decaying in the D.C. swamp. If the Fed continues to ignore this slow growth and deflationary signal from the bond market and continues along its current rate hiking path, the yield curve will invert by the end of this year and an equity market plunge and a recession is sure to follow.

An inverted yield curve, which has correctly predicted the last seven recessions going back to the late 1960’s, occurs when short-term interest rates yield more than longer-term rates. Why is an inverted yield curve so crucial in determining the direction of markets and the economy? Because when bank assets (longer-duration loans) generate less income than bank liabilities (short-term deposits), the incentive to make new loans dries up along with the money supply. And when asset bubbles are starved of that monetary fuel they burst. The severity of the recession depends on the intensity of the asset bubbles in existence prior to the inversion.

Tuesday, June 06, 2017

Several U.S. states and the federal government are hopelessly insolvent. It’s something many bullion investors have known for years.

The real question is when this reality will pierce the mainstream illusion that deficits, and the crushing pile of debt which accompany them, don’t matter. That moment drew closer last week when ratings agencies downgraded Illinois state bonds to one notch above “junk” status.

Monday, June 05, 2017

After half a decade of ultra-low rates in the United States, the Fed is hiking rates and moving ahead to reduce its massive $4.5 trillion balance sheet. The consequences will reverberate across the world, including Asia.

Before the Trump era, the Federal Reserve hoped to tighten monetary policy more often and aggressively than markets anticipated. But since November, US economic prospects have fluctuated dramatically, from the Trump trade to new volatility. Read full article... Read full article...

Monday, June 05, 2017

It’s just common sense: Borrow too much money and the weight of this debt makes it hard to do things that used to be easy. This truism is now (finally!) hitting home, and blame is being apportioned. A couple of recent examples:

(Economic Collapse Blog) – Even though I write about our ongoing long-term economic collapse every day, I didn’t realize that things were this bad. In this article, I am going to show you that the average rate of growth for the U.S. economy over the past 10 years is exactly equal to the average rate that the U.S. economy grew during the 1930s.

Thursday, June 01, 2017

As it hits, we will have to deal with the largest twin bubbles in the history of the world. One of those bubbles is global debt, especially government debt. The other is the even larger bubble of government promises.

These promises add up to hundreds of trillions of dollars. That’s vastly larger than global GDP.

These are real problems we must face. It will mean forging a new social contract. It will also require changes to taxes and the economy. I believe that within the next 5–10 years, we have to end the debt and government promises.

Sunday, May 28, 2017

If you’ve not been following this story, our view is that the auto-loan industry is Subprime 2.0: the riskiest, worst area in a massive debt bubble, much as subprime mortgage lending was the riskiest worst part of the housing bubble from 2003 to 2008.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

By Shannara Johnson : Every investor wishes he had a crystal ball. But there’s one thing, says David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff, that has predicted imminent recessions without fail.

Speaking at the Strategic Investment Conference in Orlando, Florida, Rosenberg pointed out that since 1950, there have been 13 cycles where the Federal Reserve tightened interest rates… and 10 of them ended in recession.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Putting aside hard and soft data, yield differentials continue to command FX markets as the German-US 10 year yield spread breaks above its 200-day MA for the 1st time since August to hit -1.90%. The story, however, is not only in the break of the average, but also in the fact that the formation of the spread consists of higher lows and higher highs since the December bottom, which is the same formation for EURUSD, gold and most "anti-USD" instruments.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

By now everyone with an Internet connection is aware of the “ransomware” attack that shut down hundreds of thousands of computers over the weekend.

The fact that the onslaught is just beginning — as the military-grade hacking tools developed by the NSA and recently leaked are weaponized by hackers and released into the wild — should, you’d think, be worrisome.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s book titled “The Courage to Act” is now available in paperback. This isn’t a surprise because, after all, his proclivity to print paper encompasses the totality of what his courage to act was all about. The errors in logic made in his book are too numerous to tackle in this commentary; so I’ll just debunk a few of the worst.

Monday, May 15, 2017

As we’ve been outlining over the last few weeks, the auto-loan industry is increasingly looking like Subprime 2.0: the needle that will pop the credit bubble.

Since 2009, roughly 1/3 of all new auto-loans have been subprime. That in of itself is bad, but we are now discovering that the industry in general has a problem with fraud (shades of the Housing Bubble) as well.

Tuesday, May 09, 2017

President Donald Trump has finally unveiled his broad blueprint for tax reform. Well, at least let’s call it a sketchy outline of one. It would take the top income tax rate for small businesses from 35% to 15%. Theoretically, a business that makes $500k in taxable income, which had been paying roughly $175k in Federal taxes, would then pay closer to $75k. This means our business in this example, which saved 100k in Federal taxes, would have to grow its taxable income to $1,166.666, or by 133% to provide the government with revenue neutrality.

Thursday, May 04, 2017

Examine the picture below. The global economy thrives on debt and credit. We purchase essential products using debt/credit. The U.S. dollar bill is a debt of the Federal Reserve. All debt based assets have counter-party risk.

The St. Louis Federal Reserve publishes data on “Total Debt Securities” in $ millions. Note the rapid rise since 1971 after President Nixon encouraged rapid devaluation of the dollar.

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